They tend to be shown on ITV on a Sunday night. Occasionally, one wriggles through the net and makes it to the big screen.

Kinky Boots is such a film. It's a film about cobblers.

Like The Full Monty and Calendar Girls, it’s based on a true story — of a Northamptonshire shoe factory on its uppers (pardon the pun) that switches production to make footwear for the specialist market. In other words, size 11 kinky boots for transvestites.

Charlie Price (Joel Edgerton) faces the impending closure of the business that his family has owned and operated for generations.

Just when he feels that all is lost, he has a chance encounter with Lola (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a flamboyant transvestite cabaret star.

Lola's desire for stylish, kinky boots for herself and her colleagues shines a new ray of hope on the factory and its employees.

Ejiofor gives a complete and convincing performance as Lola, playing her with all the self-conscious sassiness of a big man in a diva’s dress; exotic, sweet, dominant and often intensely moving.

He gives Shirley Bassey a run for her money with a couple of showstopping songs.

You may have some trouble placing Joel Edgerton, an Australian actor who appeared recently in Ned Kelly.

His Northampton twang will please aficionados of that beautifully modulated accent.

His mild-mannered approach as Charlie means there is a often a more interesting dynamic going on between Charlie and the brassy Lola than he can muster with any of the real women around him.

While there are no real surprises in the story, this is an entertaining little film. It it the kind that invites you to root for the little man who has the odds stacked against him.

You can share his frustration when things go wrong, back him all the way when he tries to get recognition for his wares, sympathise when he falls out with his friends, be happy when all comes right in the end.

But after the end, you will leave the cinema with a warm fuzzy feeling and then probably forget all about it.

Kinky Boots is a film that goes through all the right motions and never puts a foot wrong. But in then end I wanted more than a stroll down the middle of the road.